.... and this dark secret love will thy life destroy.
- Blake
Traveling by train every single day makes you a sensitive and a selectively sanitized person. Once you've elbowed, pinched, stamped your way into the compartment; squeezed your butt on the fourth seat next to the corporately dressed lady (with tarty red lipstick), with immense sense of pride - you have duly become a Mumbikar (or a mumbling Bombayite).
A true Mumbaikar travels in trains, the class doesn't really matter. The daily commute is often claimed to be strenuous, suffocating, friendly etc., it can be all of the above and none. But what it can not not be is uneventful! Every single day, you will either witness a fight, a business deal, a lesbian kiss, a death, a swollen jaw, hickeys on necks/backs/ arms, frowns (multiples of them), people reading an array of books from regional literature to Russian porn, breakfast parties, sorry tales, consistent adjustment of breasts within the bra or the blouse, or women sleeping carefree with their mouth's wide open.
Mumbai, as it is a city of trains, it is a city of sewage or gutters as they are fondly called. Drama King often calls Mumbaikars as 'we are all in the gutters, mademoiselle; only some of us are staring at the sky and dreaming of the stars.' The city without much surprise has more than a dozen hundred gutters, most of them are rivulets from the largest river called Mithi (read: sweet, small). Once upon a time, in a fairy tale Byzantium, this lean water source was the only source of fresh flowing water. Now it is a stink line - the pulmonary vein amongst mineral water arteries. The living symbol of Mumbai's health.
The river is at the mercy of monsoon to wash away the clogged plastic, steel, and diffusers into the ever embracing Arabian sea. The citizenry is ruthless to these gutters and swamps: it has allowed too many people to survive suicides in them, too many have thrown away enemy carcasses or flowers offered to domesticated 4-inch gods. The gutters are malleable warriors fighting survival, squeezing through the clefts and the breeches left by builders who conspiring to sink the city. Gutters are like people who sit on the forth seat, grow iceberg lettuce using the same water, packaging them in polythene to sell in train compartments to seemingly rich women obsessed with health food.
Gutter's and gutter dwellers celebrate survival; of not allowing plastic or carbon mono oxide to choke their existence, or stop the steel fringe sculptures from the blown-up train compartments, from going to work the next day. Prima facie, Mumbai is a city of the young and bold, on the inside it's a body infested with over-working, multiplying carcinogenic cells ... the city is dying, gradually sighing out, wreaking and lying. Like a dying woman, it has become exotic, historical and wanting to gulp a cup of hot chai at a go - it is fighting against time, against death.
Mumbai's losing it's taste, it's mind was always a wanderer; now it's pulling-up the keel, raising the mast and girding to sail in an iceboat.
